Cyberpunk 2077 trailers, release date, gameplay details everything we know
Everything we know about CD Project Red's hotly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077 trailers continue to surface, showing off the very hotly anticipated game from Witcher 3 developer CD Project Red.
The first proper showing from E3 2018 also gave us loads of disjointed gameplay details - on everything from whether it's first- or third-person to how classes work and whether you can play as a woman - so here on this page we've rounded up the lot of them, just in case, for some reason, you don't fancy going through the trailer frame-by-frame.
On this page:
All Cyberpunk 2077 trailers so far
Here's every Cyberpunk 2077 trailer to date, in reverse chronological order.
Cyberpunk 2077's official E3 2019 cinematic trailer, as well as the moment Keanu Reeves appeared on stage at Xbox's press conference:
Here's that 48 minute Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay video that everyone saw behind-closed-doors at E3 2018. Settle in, it's a long one!
The Cyberpunk 2077 trailer shown at Microsoft's press conference at E3 2018:
And here's the original announce trailer from 2013:
Cyberpunk 2077 release date
Cyberpunk 2077 has a release date of 16th April 2020, which is admittedly sooner we expected. Not long to wait now!
You can pre-order it from Amazon UK on PS4 and Xbox One, while on PC you can get it on Steam.
Cyberpunk gameplay details - can you create your own character, is there Cyberpunk DLC and what else do we know?
Following hot on the heels of that first big E3 trailer (scroll down to see that below), Eurogamer's Wesley Yin-Poole saw a 50-minute Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo and sat down with CD Project Red quest designer Patrick Mills to bend his ear on the game.
Later, at gamescom 2018, Eurogamer's other news hound Tom Phillips saw the same gameplay trailer again - albeit with a female main character instead - and had another Cybperunk 2077 interview with CDPR. In the wake of those big interviews then, here's a roundup of every single thing we've learned:
Character gameplay details
- Cyberpunk 2077 is an RPG. You play the role of a Cyberpunk called V, and it'll have character creation letting you choose your gender and customise things like your hair, clothing and tattoos.
- You can play as either Male or Female "body type", as it's labelled in the demo currently, with no specific labels for whether you're actually tied to being male or female yourself. CDPR acknowledged to us in Tom's interview that the option to choose different pronouns was in Cyberpunk 2020 (the role-playing game it's based on), and that they're baring that in mind.
- Cyberpunk will deal with issues of both transhumanism - the central theme of the role-playing game and a lot of cyberpunk as a genre - as well as big corporations equally.
- The game is played in first-person, not third like in The Witcher.
- There is no character class however - the system is "fluid", letting you choose aspects of the Solo (combat), Techie (equipment), or Netrunner (plugging into the network, hacking enemies and so on) classes that were brought in from the Cyberpunk 2020 game. Netrunning, CDPR confirmed to us, is limited to the tech tree for the most part in how it's implemented.
- You can put points into various attributes, such as Strength, Constitution, Intelligence and Reflexes.
- Cyberpsychosis "will be a part of the world and story" but CDPR can't say how it'll affect you the player.
- There are romance options in the game - both in terms of one night stands and longer-term relationships (and yes, there's full frontal nudity and c-bomb grade swearing).
- You have your own apartment, which acts as your base, where you can equip and prep things like your jacket (which affects a "street cred" rating), your weapons, and even go through your emails. It's also where you bring back those partners.
- You can drive vehicles in both first and third person - there's also motorbikes and potentially other vehicles to be announced, and there's vehicle combat in the form of you being able to fire your weapon while driving.
- You can modify yourself in various ways - "ripper doctors" are found around the city and they provide both legal and illegal augmentations. Examples include an optical scanner for your eye, that lets you zoom in on things and analyse objects to find out their threat level, gang affiliation, track enemies through objects and more, and a weapon grip that's grafted into your own hand that lets you see a gun's ammo count, alternate fire modes and gain additional damage.
- Your various skills can be upgraded and provide new solutions to problems, Deus Ex-style - like Engineering, which can be increased to let you disassemble panels to find new paths around town.
Combat and systems
- Those twin blades that we saw in the original teaser trailer will be in the final game - you can even use them as ledges to squat down on and jump off when on the side of a wall, like a ninja.
- Combat is gun-based, but there are loads of skills that can change it: a slow-motion bullet time skill, wall-running, a slide, and so on.
- One weapon we saw was a special tech shotgun that can blow off people's limbs and penetrate cover and enemies, or be charged up for extra damage.
- There's a ricochet targeting system that lets you bounce bullets off walls and see where they'll go in advance.
- A Smart Rifle lets you shoot homing bullets.
- You can hack enemies.
- There's weapon customisation and modification.
- There are different combat abilities within the soft "classes" - for instance the combat-focused Solo could be a "fast Solo" with things like wall-running or a "strong Solo" who can "knuckle down".
- Drug-taking is a big part of the game - you take drugs, such as the reflex-boosting Kereznikov, to enhance your performance, via an asthma pump-like device.
Story, dialogue and choices
- CD Project wants you to see Cyberpunk as more like The Witcher 3 than GTA V, mainly because of the RPG elements and how your choices affect the story.
- You get missions both from people called Fixers, who are sort of brokers for mercenaries such as yourself, as well as through stuff you just see around the world as you go.
- "It's not a linear story", according to Mills. It'll have "really involved choice and consequence" like The Witcher 3, where you won't necessarily know the outcomes of your choices as you make them. You can affect the main story "pretty significantly".
- There will be some differences in how the story plays out depending on how you build your character at the start, such as whether you play as a man or a woman. The romances are also affected: not all characters are bisexual, "we want them to feel like living people with histories".
- You have dialogue options, but the character says their own version of them, not a word-for-word repeat of the line you chose.
- You can talk your way out of tricky situations - there are often violent, non-violent, and "other" solutions to tense situations.
- Dialogue isn't locked behind a skill tree though - hacking and engineering has skill-checks, but dialogue doesn't: "we don't want to gate speech behind particular classes or anything like that. We want that to be about the story and about your choices in the story."
Night City and the game world
- Night city is a fictional city, based in alternate-future California.
- You're not just limited to the city - "You can go some way further" outside of it, according to developer CD Project Red. Maybe like in GTA 5? Or maybe more or less.
- CD Project Red aren't ready to talk about literal size yet but "it's going to be really dense" and "huge". The main point to note is that it's "very vertical" in comparison to games like The Witcher 3 - so it might not be further across, but the added dimension will likely mean it's far denser.
- You can run over pedestrians like in GTA but that's not really the aim of it.
- There's much more of a focus on vehicular combat as you travel around than there was in The Witcher 3 (in terms of fighting on horseback, that is).
- There's a day and night cycle, and a weather system - they showed Night City during the day to highlight the fact that you can get away with all of these awful things in without the cover of darkness.
- In terms of the classic tropes: "dark city streets, the rain slicked streets, those are great. And those are in our game. We absolutely do have those."
- Likewise, stuff like eating noodles at night in the rain: "That is there for sure". But that's not all. There's an emphasis on Night City being a place that hits you with "a wall of culture", with different art styles and tones that makes it feel like "a real city, an international city and a city that's alive". There'll be a lot of international influences from all kinds of cultures around the world.
- There are a variety of things around the world that "draw you into quests" - one of Wes' examples was seeing a crime scene being reinacted by holograms as you walk by the law enforcement investigating.
- There'll be a variety of districts - the one shown in the demo was called Watson, which is actually a fallen corporation. "We also have a slums area. We have an area with rich mansions. The districts should all feel distinct. Some of them may feel a little bit more sedate. They aren't. It's just hiding. Those places are just as dangerous as everywhere else in Night City, but for different reasons."
- There isn't procedural generation and while the developers want to ensure that "if you see some place interesting, you can go there and experience it," you can't enter every building, as they want to ensure a "hand-crafed detail" is always possible.
- There are no loading screens, and no "barriers" to provent you moving around the city.
Multiplayer, DLC and plans for the future
- Cyberpunk 2077 is entirely single-player at launch.
- Multiplayer is "in Research and Development" at CD Project Red, both in relation to Cyberpunk and in general at the studio, but that doesn't meen it'll definitely come - they're looking into it, basically, and if it were to come it definitely won't be there anywhere near launch.
- You don't have a party or anything like that either, although other characters might join you for quests in-game.
- The game is set to come out "on Xbox One, PS4 and PC. At the moment." - that's as strong a suggestion as any, at this point, that Cyberpunk would be a cross-generational game. But that's also far from a confirmation that it will be, either.
- There's still no release date: "when it's done!"
- There will be DLC - we learned this from that hidden message which we discuss below: we can expect the same sort of thing - paid story expansions and free smaller DLC - as with the Witcher 3, according to that hidden statement.
- Likewise according to that statement there are no microtransactions - "Are you nuts?" in the words of CD Project Red.
Oh, and here's some more detail in the form of blub about the characters and world of Cyberpunk that was handed out to the press at the E3 demo:
Highlights from that include more info on the characters and corporations in particular - the sinister-sounding "megacorp" Militech, for instance, sounds awfully like it'll be the big bad of the game...
Cyberpunk 2077 secret website password, easter eggs and ARGs
Okay so, you know how we said we got a CG trailer and not much else? Well, turns out CD Project Red snuck in some extra little details to their trailer after all. A lot of the questions and hints here have since been delved into in the E3 interviews we detailed above, but there's still the odd extra nugget of info in there (and it's fun to look into, anyway!).
Free codes for the Witcher 3 easter egg:
Firstly the fun thing: right at the start - in the conference live stream, not the trailer itself - there's a moment where a load of red writing rapidly scrolls up the page. That's actually a big list of Xbox codes for free copies of The Witcher 3 and its expansion pass!
Hidden statement from CD Project Red:
That first easter egg's nothing: the real stuff is hidden in some other, background red text that very briefly flickers into the trailer when the logo appears. Thankfully, someone managed to find it and someone else managed to transcribe it. Classic internet. Here's the image and below is what it says (credit to Resetera users The Deep End and Heid for finding and trascribing respectively, as well as our own guy Paul Watson for enhance it to make it a little clearer):
"It's been over 2077 days since we announced our plan to develop Cyberpunk 2077. We released a CGI trailer, gave some interviews and... went dark. Normal procedure for these kinds of things - you announce a game and then shut up, roll up your sleeves, and go to work. We wanted to give you The Witcher 3 and both expansions first, which is why this period of staying silent was longer than we planned. Sorry for that.
"As soon as we concluded work on Blood and Wine, we were able to go on full speed ahead with CP2077's pre-production. But we chose to remain silent. Why? At some point, we made a decision to resume talking about the game only when we have something to show. Something meaningful and substantial. This is because we do realise you've been (im)patiently waiting for a very long time, and we wouldn't like anyone to feel that we're taking this for granted. On the contrary - it gives us a lot of extra motivation. The hype is real, so the sweat and tears need to be real too :).
"But to the point. Today is the day. If you're seeing this, it means you saw the trailer our vision of Cyberpunk, an alternative version of the future where America is in pieces. Megacorporations [unreadable] civilised life, and gangs rule the rest. And, while this world is full of adrenaline, don't let the car chases and guns mislead you. Cyberpunk 2077 is a true single-player story adventure RPG. You'll be able to create your own character and... well, you'll get to know the rest from what we show at our booth at E3. Be on the lookout for the previews!
"Before we finish, you probably have some questions. [Unreadable]?
"1. When? When we told you we would only release the game when it's ready, we meant it. We're definitely much, much closer to a release date than when we were back then :), but it's still not the time to confirm anything, so patience is still required. Quality is the only thing that drives us - it's the beauty of being an independent studio and your own publisher.
"2. How big? Seriously big, but... to be honest, we have no bloody clue [unreadable] you can expect. And we promise we'll do this before we start talking about any pre-orders or ask anything of you.
"3. Free DLC/Expansions/DRM? Expect nothing less than you got with The Witcher 3. As for DRM, CP2077 will be 100% DRM-free on PC.
"4. Microtransactions? In a single-player role-playing game? Are you nuts?
"Once again, thank you for your patience.
"Yours,
"CD Projekt Red Team."
Secret website and password easter egg:
Yep, there's more. There's also a secret website, which you can access by entering 212.91.11.20 into your web browser, which will look like this:
What's the password? "NC20 CP77" - but the problem is, there's a limit on the number of people who can visit, and they've already managed it. Thankfully some kind souls took some screenshots of the page it reveals and... it's another tease, this time of the CD Project logo:
Crikey! Quite a lot of teases, secrets, hints and easter eggs for just one E3 trailer. If anything else pops up though, we'll be sure to update this page right here.
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